My God and My Country

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 - 1599 Geneva Bible

13 I would not brethren, have you ignorant concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not even as others which have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus is dead, and is risen, even so them which sleep in Jesus, will God bring with him.
The Apostle herein says do not be overly mournful and concerned about those that have passed away before us, for they also will rise in Christ, as Christ has already risen. God is not so unjust as to let those that have passed away in Christ to leave them in the grave.
R.P. Woitowitz

“Perhaps what he says here was part of what he wanted to teach them, as not having seen it proper before to enter into these discoveries; namely, whether the last generation should die at all or no; and whether the dead saints should be raised before the living were transformed. But, having heard that they still lamented over their dead, like their heathen neighbors, and perhaps that they still hired mourners,—were apt to repine at the Divine providence,—to lament, and be excessively dejected; he here delivers two most important truths, to dry up their tears: 1. He briefly repeats what he had taught already, strongly asserting the resurrection of the pious dead to an eternal life of holiness and happiness, in consequence of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and according to his express and repeated promises. 2. He makes this new discovery,—that the last generation of saints should not die at all, but be on a sudden changed into immortals. From which he concludes, that the Christians ought to leave off their excessive lamentations for their deceased friends, and no longer imitate their heathen neighbors, who, though they might have some obscure notions and expectations of the immortality of the soul, had no such hopes as the Christian of a resurrection from the dead, and of an eternal life of such holy and glorious enjoyments; in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the holy angels, and of all the wisest, worthiest, and best of men, who will be perfect and happy as well as they; he state of the bodies of the pious dead in their graves is not only here, but in many other passages of scripture, described as a short sleep, compared with that eternal life into which they shall awake in the morning of the resurrection. This 14th verse ought to be read in a parenthesis, it being a repetition of what the Apostle had more fully instructed them in before. The resurrection of Christ was the grand fact upon which the whole Christian religion depended; and with it, the resurrection of mankind in general, but more especially of the just, was joined in the closest connection. This is what the Apostle elsewhere shews at large; here he only reminds the Thessalonians of it in a short parenthesis, and passes on to the further discovery mentioned in the preceding note.”
Thomas Coke